Want to see how America is changing? Property taxes hold the answer

[Nine_Ender]

Nah, you're just a Democrat; an affliction for which there is no cure.

Maybe if you were better educated you'd understand the value of educating young people.

 

[RosyScenario]

Maybe if you were better educated you'd understand the value of educating young people.

Arff! Yet another Democrat. But this time it's one who is also a bold-faced blatant lair! I have always placed a very high value on education. Much more than you, as I was taught to appreciate the increased value and significance of personal responsibility and having a little real-time skin in the game, rather, as in this case, paying for it later anyway, maybe tenfold, through taxes. (And yes, Sig, 10% is only a small amount for something this important and potentially life-changing.)

 

[Nine_Ender]

Arff! Yet another Democrat. But this time it's one who is also a bold-faced blatant lair! I have always placed a very high value on education. Much more than you, as I was taught to appreciate the increased value and significance of personal responsibility and having a little real-time skin in the game, rather, as in this case, paying for it later anyway, maybe tenfold, through taxes. (And yes, Sig, 10% is only a small amount for something this important and potentially life-changing.)

You lack the common sense to understand why your plan is totally unsustainable.

 

[ET180]

You started off by saying you shouldn't have to pay property tax to send other people's kids to school. Since property taxes pay for K-12 education, you were saying we should abolish K-12 public education. Kindergarten, 6 year old's. Focus, we're not talking about choosing easy college majors or getting your GED and becoming a truck driver. We're talking about if a 6 year old whose parents can't afford to send them to school, even if they had the audacity to be born to fat, drug using welfare moms. According to you they should either skip school and eventually get a GED, or we should loan them the money so that by age 7 they're thousands of dollars in debt. That's absurd, no matter how much you try to dance around it with a bunch of irrelevant drivel about truck drivers and which college major you choose.
Should I have to send my kids to private school? Perhaps you could make an argument for that, although there are strong arguments against as well. But effectively eliminating education for 6 year old's who were born poor is unarguable, as you've demonstrated by calling for it but arguing for everything but what you called for.
And you really should read up on the fundamental attribution bias, because you don't get it at all or your purposely ignoring my points. While some of your success can be attributed to your choices, the vast majority of it is due to pure chance. You would not be where you are today if you had been born in Chad instead of where you were born, true or false? When you respond to that with "there are parts of America that are dangerous even where the people have access to free healthcare and medicine.", you express first your profound ignorance of what it's like in a place like Chad since that statement is absurd. But more than that you clearly show your suffering from the fundamental attribution bias because if there were parts of American even approaching Chad it would only reinforce the fact that you could only have gotten where you are because of the random good chance that you weren't born to a poor family in one of those places. I'll give you a further challenge, even after all the benefits you've experienced to get you to the engineering degree you have, you couldn't succeed NOW if I sent you into Chad even if I made you fluent in French before hand. You wouldn't have the infrastructure that we have in the U.S., paid for with taxes. You wouldn't have an educated population, paid for by taxes. You wouldn't have a safe environment, paid for by taxes. You wouldn't be free from foreign attack, paid for by taxes. Among other things. Unless you worked for a multinational, paid money that came from the same place you came from, you wouldn't be as successful as you are today, because you don't have the benefit of everything we collectively built in the U.S. that enables your success (and mine), something you appear to be entirely blind to.
You have a very black and white, binary mind which isn't uncommon among us engineering types (I'm an EE). To you taxes are mostly wasted on the lazy, you got where you are entirely through your own effort, and anyone else can and should be able to achieve the same and if they don't it's because of their own poor life choices. That's a very naive and childish view of the world that I too had as a young engineer. Hopefully like me it will change a bit as you mature and have kids of your own so you understand what a 6 year old truly is and isn't able to be responsible for, as well as how lucky you were to have been born in the place you were with the mind you have to the parents you have.

Wow. You still can't answer my direct question that I asked you 3 separate times throughout this thread. I'll copy/paste it again and put it in a special quote box for you:

Why can't people (or most people, allowing a buffer for a very small minority of the population that is born handicapped or became handicapped through accident or severe illness) pay for the own education and retirement?

Now you're claiming that I'm getting off topic and my very concrete and simple example about the truck driver in the US being able to pay back all his debts to society over his career (as millions of truck drivers have done) is just irrelevant while going off on some unconnected tangent about Chad and trying to claim that I'm anti-education. I never said that poor children should be uneducated. I simply showed that even someone from a bad background (but admittedly still lucky enough to be born in the US) can still earn a good living and pull their own weight even without the benefit of good parents or education.

While some of your success can be attributed to your choices, the vast majority of it is due to pure chance.

That's a really hard argument for you to defend especially on a place like this. The vast majority of people don't simply inherit enough money to get to the 1%...that's mathematically impossible. It's not just choices, it's sacrifice. The amount of time we have is a finite resource. A lot of people sacrifice a lot of time and opportunity cost to reach their goals. In some cases, like pursuing medical school, it's also a huge financial risk. It goes way beyond a choice my friend.

You would not be where you are today if you had been born in Chad instead of where you were born, true or false?

Of course not, I'd be a very different person. I don't deny that environment has an influence. It unquestionably does. But it's not just infrastructure and other things that come from taxes that make the difference. I'll submit to you that it's almost entirely due to culture. Even though Chad is a tough place to live, would you agree that they still have more technology and education (even if imported from the rest of the world through aid) than the US had back in 1776? But how come the US was not as violent back then (excluding the Revolutionary War of course) as Chad is today? I don't think it's a matter of genetics or race. Even Australia was formed from a prison colony. People there did not start out educated or had any substantial wealth. How did they succeed? The only variable is culture. It's kind of like asking, "What would happen if I put you on an island full of tigers...how do you think you would turn out?"

Congrats on the EE degree. We have that in common.

 

[ET180]

Expectation can be formulated from studying actual results. Tens of millions do not save up enough for retirement or the health care they need in old age. Sometimes, it's not their fault, their career path got disrupted as the economy changed. Sometimes they get disabled or sick, or family members the same. Young idealistic single people with no kids and no disruptions ( yet ) in their job(s) may not relate to any of this. They think they have the world figured out and have no idea the real cost of raising kids. It is easy to cover your own expenses and services when you only answer to yourself and your parents already paid for your grade school education.

Without enough families with kids, a nation depends on significant immigration or it ages. When it ages, the base of people paying for everything through their taxes shrinks but the expenses of the older generation grows. If people are not well educated, it gets worse. Too many people unemployed or in poor quality jobs that result in very little income tax paid and no chance at all to save for anything, never mind retirement.

I've periodically heard some single guys who put off marriage or kids voice similar ideas before, that you should be ready for the expense and it's your deal. Not really how life works. Having kids has benefits to the entire society, especially in aging populations like the US and Canada. Just because it's not an immediate easily seen benefit to you doesn't negate it.

Even if your own "utopian" type of system existed, it would be a logistical nightmare trying to get the money collected to pay for services and no doubt there would be huge debt collection issues. People could just use the services ( like educating their kids ), then declare bankruptcy and start again ( like Trump did with his businesses numerous times ). Look at what happened to mortgages and health care in the US when politicians tried to let "the market" and citizens look after their own interests.

Ultimately, I don't see any way to cover the demographic issue (and Japan is far worse off than the US in that regard) other than by extending the amount of time people spend working. Typical person only spends, what 1/3 or under 1/2 of their lives working? The rest is spent consuming. I think the problem will be naturally cured. As lifespan increases, it won't be as much of a burden to spend more time working.

http://discoverysedge.mayo.edu/2016/01/29/experts-explain-the-longevity-dividend/

 

[peilthetraveler]

Why should someone with no kids who never went to a public school have to pay excessively to send his neighbor's kids to school?

Because you really don't want a bunch of uneducated kids with nothing to do in the daytime roaming around your house while you're at work. Don't think of it as a tax on you to educate someone elses kids. Think of it as a tax to keep those kids in a confined area during the day while you're out earning a living.

 

[java]

Listen to me young man, you either go out and get a job or we will send you to school! And school is no picnic!!!

 

[S-Trader]

What I don't understand is why you set such low expectations for people that they have to depend on others for retirement. Why do we assume that people can't be expected to save up enough money for retirement? I can understand and support supporting those who are mentally or physically unable to care for themselves (especially veterans) as long as it wasn't a consequence of poor life choices (smoking, obesity, drug use, alcoholism, etc.). But where does the extremely low expectation that most people will need to depend on others to change bedpans and will not have saved up enough to pay for it come from? Why assume that everyone is dependent on a small minority of people?

What about medical/healthcare/eldercare costs? They can eat away at, or even wipe out retirement savings in a surprisingly short amount of time, they're not easy to anticipate in terms of scale, and we're living longer.

Roughly 40% of us will get cancer at some point in our lives. By age 65, the risk of having Alzheimer’s is one in six (17 percent) for women and one in 11 (9 percent) for men. Beginning at age 60, your chance of getting dementia doubles every five years... and if you survive into your nineties, then there is roughly a one in four chance that you will have dementia. Yada, yada, OK... but many people underestimate both the costs involved for fairly common healthcare/eldercare issues, and overestimate the extent to which insurance will cover those costs.

As for "poor life choices" -- aside from the obvious cases (e.g., drug addict, morbidly obese person), how can you really determine or differentiate what those are, and/or to what extent they contributed to any given person's situation?

 

[java]

What about medical/healthcare/eldercare costs? They can eat away at, or even wipe out retirement savings in a surprisingly short amount of time, they're not easy to anticipate in terms of scale, and we're living longer.

Roughly 40% of us will get cancer at some point in our lives. By age 65, the risk of having Alzheimer’s is one in six (17 percent) for women and one in 11 (9 percent) for men. Beginning at age 60, your chance of getting dementia doubles every five years... and if you survive into your nineties, then there is roughly a one in four chance that you will have dementia. Yada, yada, OK... but many people underestimate both the costs involved for fairly common healthcare/eldercare issues, and overestimate the extent to which insurance will cover those costs.

As for "poor life choices" -- aside from the obvious cases (e.g., drug addict, morbidly obese person), how can you really determine or differentiate what those are, and/or to what extent they contributed to any given person's situation?

Once the elderly exhaust their life savings they simply go on medicaid. So we have all the elderly people and all the poor people taken care of. What more do you need comrade?

 

[ET180]

Because you really don't want a bunch of uneducated kids with nothing to do in the daytime roaming around your house while you're at work. Don't think of it as a tax on you to educate someone elses kids. Think of it as a tax to keep those kids in a confined area during the day while you're out earning a living.

Well, I guess you have a point.